Comments

I agree that this situation could have been much worse without 63 twinned, however, there are many communities in high risk forest fire areas that have one road in and one road out. For example Slave Lake, Wabasca, Calling Lake, Manning, La Crete, Rainbow Lake and lets not forget Grande Cache to name a few.

Sheila is correct in that there are many communities with only one way in or out. However, those communities are much smaller. Take Grande Cache for example. Current population is approximately 4300, a far easier number to manage than 88,000 during an evacuation. Even Slave Lake is only about 6800 people. Perhaps we need to look at a maximum load limit during an evacuation. Like if a population is 10,000 or more, an alternate route is planned and built. I would hope the think tanks would take a good hard look at the events in Ft. Mac and come up with some viable solutions for remote towns/cities of that size.

Sheila should look at a map. Her examples mostly have at least 2 roads, as does Fort Mac. Slave Lake has 4, one being a gravel road.
The proposed road from Fort Mac to Red Earth already is a winter road. About 3/4ths of it is an all weather gravel road. The costs wouldn’t be as bad as suggested.